Sanctum launched on Solana in 2023 with a weird and brilliant idea: what if there wasn’t just one liquid staking token, or ten, but thousands? What if any validator, any DAO, any project could mint their own LST in minutes? Sanctum built the infrastructure to make this possible, plus a unified liquidity layer called Infinity that let any Sanctum-minted LST swap instantly into SOL or any other LST without waiting for an unstake period.
The technical insight was subtle. Instead of having every LST fragment liquidity into its own pool, Sanctum treated all LSTs as fungible claims on the same underlying asset (SOL plus validator rewards) and pooled their liquidity. This meant a tiny new LST could launch with deep liquidity from day one, because it inherited Infinity’s entire pool. The UX for users was “click to swap any LST to any other LST.” The UX for validators was “mint your own liquid staking token in 30 seconds and instantly have liquidity.”
Sanctum’s CLOUD token launched in June 2024 with a ~$150 million FDV, distributed via a major airdrop to Solana power users. The launch was controversial because of eligibility filtering, but by 2025 Sanctum was the backbone of Solana’s liquid staking ecosystem, powering hundreds of LSTs including JupSOL (Jupiter’s), bonkSOL, hubSOL, and dozens of community-branded stakes.
The reason Sanctum matters beyond its own metrics is that it reframed what a liquid staking token is for. Before Sanctum, an LST was a financial product. After Sanctum, an LST became a community asset — a way for a project or DAO to let its fans earn yield while flying its flag. That’s a small conceptual shift with huge implications for how stake flows through the Solana validator set.
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